Thursday, August 25, 2011

TICKETMASTER AND FACEBOOK TEAM UP FOR SOCIAL SEATING

One of the biggest hassles about buying tickets to a concert is getting your friends to buy when you do. With major arena shows, like Katy Perry or Bob Dylan, for example, there are literally thousands of seats to fill and if you don’t buy you and your friends’ tickets together, there’s a good chance you’ll be sitting across the stadium from each other. But there may be an easier way. Today, Ticketmaster announced that it has teamed up with Facebook to make buying tickets a little easier.

Ticketmaster rolled out its interactive seat maps feature about a year ago, but the company just released a new interactive seating map feature that lets ticket buyers see where their friends are sitting. To do this, you have to connect your Facebook account to Ticketmaster, and then when you get to the part of the ticket-buying process where you have an option to choose your seats, you can look at where your Facebook friends are sitting, as well as anyone else on Facebook who made their seat location public.

Once you buy your ticket, you’ll have the option of making your seat location public to everyone, your friends, or no one. Also, if you’ve already bought tickets to something, you can go back in and tag your seat number. The sat map will show tiny Facebook flags to denote your friends’ seats. You can hover over the flag to see who’s sitting there, which can be creepy if you accidentally make your seat location public and anyone buying a ticket can see where you’ll be sitting.

The interactive seat map will let you buy the closest ticket possible to your friend, but there’s no guarantee that even if you try to buy a ticket a half an hour after your friend that there will be seats nearby. Also, for the shows where pricing is tiered from the cheapo nose-bleed seats to the expensive orchestra seats, you may be upset to find your friends can afford nicer seats than you.